Mark Thompson

Dr. Mark Thompson, "independent evaluator and journalist, is the author of Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina (London, 1994 and 1999), a widely acclaimed analysis of the role that media played in the final crisis and breakdown of Yugoslavia. The book has been translated into Croatian and Serbian, and the 1999 edition was chosen as one of the ‘Books of the Year’ by two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer. He also wrote A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (1992) and contributed to Unfinished Peace, the 1996 report of the International Commission on the Balkans. In 1999, Thompson wrote a long report for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on international assistance to the media in former Yugoslavia, which he presented to the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna.  He also co-edited and co-authored, with Monroe Price, Forging Peace: Intervention, Human rights and the Management of Media Space (Edinburgh, 2002), the first full-length study of the roles that media can play in post-conflict reconstruction. In 1994 and 1995, he directed the Media Analysis Unit within UNPROFOR, the UN mission to the former Yugoslavia. In 1998 and 1999, he was the first Spokesman and Director of Media Affairs within the enlarged OSCE Mission to Croatia. In 2004 Thompson directed a project for the Netherlands NGO, Press Now, resulting in a report surveying the media development activities of OSCE missions in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and in 2005 he moderated an international conference on this topic at the Netherlands Foreign Ministry. In 2005, he was an expert witness on media at the ICTY trial of Momcilo Krajisnik, one of the wartime leaders of the Bosnian Serbs. In recent years, he has worked as a freelance media-policy consultant for the Danish Foreign Ministry, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the UK Department for International Development, International Media Support (Denmark), International IDEA (Sweden), Article 19 (UK), the Open Society Institute (OSI, Budapest and London), and as Balkans Programme Director of the International Crisis Group."

Coauthor of the report Bosnia: Reshaping the International Machinery (with Elsina Wainwright, Gareth Evans, and Mark Wheeler), International Crisis Group Balkans Report No. 121, Sarajevo and Brussels, November 2001. "